Let us take the following lines from the current passage in which the divine Shakti is instructing Aswapati, instructing him in a voice “absolute and wise”: (Savitri, p. 340)Assent to thy high self, create, endure. Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast, No more in earthly limits pen thy force; Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.

Aswapati has already “endured” and “toiled” so much, made his work so much vast and incomparable that even the long unaeonic time cannot match it, cannot do it, and yet he is told to continue, in his high self, to do what he had been doing since long. Is it because of any shortcoming in what he has done so far, his yoga-tapasya not adequate to deserve the kind of reward or siddhi he is aspiring for, or is there some real practical difficulty that haste would prove disastrous? In either case, the tone of the voice, “absolute and wise”, is imperative and not recommendatory, not indicative, suggestive. There is a strong implication of it being obligatory.

It is in this context that we must re-look at the editing of the present text of Savitri. There is some difficulty about punctuation at the end of the second line and the verbal use in the third line. About “vast,” or “vast.” in the second line, we are told the following: “The punctuation of the manuscript is unclear. There is only a faint cluster of dots. The ledger has a comma. The reasons for rejecting this comma do not appear to be very strong. However, it might be pointed out that with ‘can’ in the following line, there is a change from the imperative in the present line (‘Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast’) to the indicative in the next line (‘No more can earthly limits pen thy force’, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in his last handwritten version). Perhaps this makes a full stop after ‘vast’ somewhat more appropriate than a comma, if the next correction is accepted.” The next correction pertains to the third line in the above, whether it is “in” or “can”.

This line in Sri Aurobindo’s own hand, in the penultimate draft, is “No more in earthly limits pen thy force” which he revised to “No more can earthly limits pen thy force” in the last version when he himself revised the passage. However, when this was transferred by Nirodbaran—who was the Savitri-scribe—to the ledger, while making a fair copy, he wrote “in” in place of “can” of the last manuscript that was in front of him. Or could it be that both the drafts were there with him while copying, just for reference, and he copied “in” from the previous one—which is not unlikely? With this—“can” of the final text replaced by “in” in the fair copy of the ledger—the indicative of “No more can earthly limits…” becomes imperative in “No more can earthly limits…”; if the indicative is to be accepted then the line should be separated from the previous two imperative lines, “Assent to thy high self…” and “Cease not from knowledge…”

So with two imperatives at the beginning and one at the end, and with one indicative in the third, the lines should be read as follows:Assent to thy high self, create, endure. Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast. No more can earthly limits pen thy force; Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.

But the following will admit all the four imperatives:Assent to thy high self, create, endure. Cease not from knowledge, let thy toil be vast, No more in earthly limits pen thy force; Equal thy work with long unending Time’s.

This combination of four imperatives has the advantage of forming one single block of thought- or idea-suggestion and has a certain homogeneity which seems to be more appealing, more acceptable than the hybrid of the imperative-indicative. We should also remember that the four-imperative block was read out to Sri Aurobindo on several occasions later and he allowed it to stand, with his own earlier “in”. After all, there is no compelling reason or convincing way of refuting that the “faint cluster” of dots after “vast” was not referred to Sri Aurobindo and the matter was settled with “vast,” and “in”. RYD